Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Editing Lisp

In which I decide to start hacking in lisp, and that rocks my editing world.
The options for editing lisp in Vim are pretty limited.
Well, let's be precise. Vim is a pretty good lisp editor, when you compare it with almost anything except emacs.
There have been attempts to bring Vim up to emacs' level. There was a project to integrate ECL with Vim. It was part of a larger project, Slim-Vim to write a Vim interface to SLIME, the excellent emacs lisp development system.
Unfortunately, Slim-Vim is dead. Both of its primary developers have abandoned it. According to their farewell emails, one now develops lisp using a commercial IDE, and the other uses emacs and SLIME.
Generally, the advice for people like me is to suck it up and use emacs. You will be assimilated.
Others do still use Vim for lisp, and I still prefer Vim for actually editing lisp. I've done some crazy, complicated things to get it to integrate with a running lisp system. The version of lisp I usually use, SBCL, doesn't include readline in the REPL ("Use SLIME," they say), and using it without command history, etc., is painful. So I would start emacs and SLIME, and I would start Vim. I would open the file in both emacs and Vim. Editing would occur in Vim, then I would refresh the buffer in emacs and feed my changes into SBCL.
I know.
Suck it up. Use emacs.
Eventually, that will be how this story ends.
First, I'm going to try Cusp, an Eclipse plug in for lisp development. Aside from being a lot prettier, I'm not sure what it has over emacs+SLIME.
What do you use for lisp hacking? (If I get no answers, I'll assume everyone uses emacs.)

4 comments:

I am a lisp newbie and vim is my favorite editor. I don't know much about Emacs and I feel it has a boring interface. May be its because I got used to vim so much, and now I am feeling like I got to use Emacs ... :)